Just a few years ago, the Sahel region at the northern edge of Senegal was a “barren wasteland” where nothing had grown for 40 years. But the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and local villagers teamed up to regreen the area, bringing back agriculture, improving the economy of the people who live there, and preventing the climate migration that desertification ultimately leads to.
Something along the lines of “hiring heavy equipment, then buying a ticket to the gym, everytime you need this done because you never learned anything else”. My neighbours tell me I need heavy equipment to fell my forest, absolutely not, I’ll go on foot, respect and fell every single tree I plan to fell, leave no tracks, become stronger and wiser, all for free.
Heavy equipment is not cheap, too, especially if you need an operator with skill comparable with attention to small details that manual laborers have naturally. And it does not spread virally like skills. And it burns carbon and leaves tracks. It has its uses at scale, but not in pilots. Same thing everywhere: I have a pick-and-place robot to assemble my electronics, not even turning it on before I have at least 100-ish boards to assemble; it’s not expensive, it’s easier than manual labor - but you’ve got to know the system you build before giving it away to a machine, or you’ll have a long and expensive debug session ahead of you, even if you are certain know everything about it, which is totally not the case here.
Oh no… tracks. In the barren wasteland. Where the whole point is creating divots for water.
You got a well-written, thoughtful and meaningful comment, and you mined it for one nitpick to sarcastically attack as if it was the whole point.
Pearls before swine.
It’s dissembling nonsense on every level. The first sentence doesn’t even parse. Half the comment is irrelevant self-congratulatory wank about trees and electronics. There’s about fifteen contiguous words that matter, at all, and they’re buried in the middle of three half-wrong sentences.
The scale of this “pilot” wasn’t one fucking hole. It’s acres of them. A single backhoe would still be busy for weeks.
I only picked one nit because it highlights the failure to recognize what matters, here. Tracks are not a negative. There’s no grass being torn up, like the nimble woodsman here seems to be picturing. It’s barren wasteland.
That picked nit, by the way, was a concise and impersonal rebuke of only that point. When I want to attack someone I am not fucking subtle. But thanks for dragging this all out, with your performative eye-rolling that contributes nothing but unpleasant disdain.
All three of the “sentences” in your reply don’t fucking parse if you want to be goddamn garmmar nazi about it.
It’s fragmentary delivery of one sentence which you plainly understood just fine.
Actual hypocrisy would be you mining a wide-ranging rebuke for that failed riposte.
It wasn’t hypocrisy, I was demonstrating a lack of respect for anything you had to say, just like you did. Doesn’t feel good, does it?
That’s still hypocrisy, dipshit. And projection.
You don’t get to condescend to me after getting the detail you barged in to sneer about, and then doing the exact thing you were sneering about.
Hypocrisy means a lack of self-reflection, and I am perfectly able to reflect on the fact that I was deliberately disrespecting you, and I think it was a fine thing to do actually.
You took a meaningful, thoughtful reply and dismissed it with a nitpick that, by the way, completely missed the point.
Your response to my critique was pure toxicity, just laden with contempt for me and the other commenter. The fact you started with a grammatical complaint shows how utterly shallow and vapid your replies are.
You’re an asshole, and I have no trouble talking to you like an asshole. However, I won’t let you waste any more of my time, so this is the last thing I’ll say to you. Feel free to shock me by not being an asshole in your final reply.